February 20, 2018

ENG I'm just back from a soothing holiday in Tenerife, cleansed – less stress, less depression – and, hopefully, with a new perspective on life.More than beach finds (that I love) my trip was about soul-searching: I was on a mission to design the life I love (lovely book by Ayse Birsel, click here). – The fellow in the following Haruki Murakami extract makes beach finds a metaphor of his whole life... and I just can't help comparing the junk, as he calls it, the junk that the author can have imagined washing ashore in 1985 when Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was published, to today's debris. Let alone 2050, when there is expected to be more plastic in the seas than fish! – Let's love our seas and try to keep them special, as Murakami says them to be!

"You want to know about me?" she asked. "Where I was born, what I was like as a girl, where I went to school, when I lost my virginity, what's my favorite color––all that?"
"No," I said. "You're fine as you are. I'll learn more as it comes."
"I'd like to get to know more about you though, little by little."
"I was born by the sea," I said. "I'd go to the beach the morning after a typhoon and find all sorts of things that the waves had tossed up. There'd be bottles and wooden geta and hats and cases for glasses, tables and chairs, things from nowhere near the water. I liked combing trough the stuff, so I was always waiting for the next typhoon."
I put out my cigarette.
"The strange thing is, everything washed up from the sea was purified. Useless junk, but absolutely clean. There wasn't a dirty thing. The sea is special in that way. When I look back over my life so far, I see all that junk on the beach. It's how my life has always been. Gathering up the junk, sorting through it, and then casting it off somewhere else. All for no purpose, leaving it to wash away again."
"This was in your home town?"
"This is all my life. I merely go from one beach to another. Sure I remember the things that happen in between, but that's all. I never tie them together. They're so many things, clean but useless."
She touched my shoulder, then went to the kitchen. She returned with wine for her and beer for me.
"I like the moments of darkness before dawn," she said. "Probably because it's a clean state. Clean and unused."
She snuggled up close next to me on the sofa, pulling the blanket up to her breasts, then took a sip of wine. I poured myself some beer... – Haruki Murakami: Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Vintage 2003, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum)

Recyclie, that's me, a foodie gone (re)cycling: This blog's all about bicycle riding, living and cooking on a shoestring, and, naturally, recycling, or "repairing, repainting, reinterpreting, reviving, redeploying or simply relishing" – to quote one of my favorite interior designers and authors, Ilse Crawford–, feminine and Finnish style, with an Italian twist. In real life, I'm a Helsinki-based interpreter and translator, as well as the author of "Reilun kaupan ruokaa ja elämää" (Perhemediat, 2009), that is, the first Finnish Fairtrade cookbook.